Aftermath
by darklight ascendant
Summary: after EC, what? The C Cube has left human knowledge, but in its wake are untidy knots across the generally ordered stream that is humanity. RANDOM, NO LOGICAL PLOT.
1. A Forgotten Errand

**The Aftermath of the C Cube**

  


I: A Forgotten Errand

  


When Pex woke up, he found himself in a cramped lock-up cell in the Chicago district pententiary. His partner in stupidity, Chips, had already been up for a while. A while too long, that is; he had somehow tied six of his fingers into a dense knot and was trying to untie them. He hadn't thought of wiggling them yet.

After about six hours, a string of intelligible words exited Pex's mouth. "Chips, is this Phonetix?" To his credit, six hours was an unusually brief reaction time.

"I...uh...I don't think so. I don't see any computers."

"But the walls look kind of same."

"No they don't! The walls in Phonetix are kinda plastery, y'know? They're the kinds that break when you punch them like this - " Chips proceeded to dismantle his hands with a blow to the concrete wall.

Pex looked on, disinterestedly, as Chips cradled his rearranged hands and bawled like a baby. "Uh, Chips, did that hurt?"

Silence. Not unusual, considering the minuteness of Chips' brain.

  


When Holly had _mesmerized_ them to goad Jon Spiro into invading Phonetix, she had had a tremendously difficult job. They barely knew what Phonetix was; to them it was just another curse word Spiro shouted all the time, like a bark to a dog. She had to teach them what competition was, for crying out loud; and so she had to use her healing powers to augment their intelligence by about four-hundred-and-fifty percent. That gave them a mental age of twenty. This enhancement still hadn't worn off yet, which was why this conversation could even happen.

Pex took about a day to decide that Chips' hands hurt. "You wanna go see the doctor?"

"But we can't even get out of this room. What are they holding us here for, anyway?"

"Gee, I dunno. Maybe the walnut I crushed in the interview _did_ sue us for murder."

"Come on, you idiot, walnuts can't sue people."

"But he said he would! He said so!"

"Walnuts can't talk."

"Can too!"

"Cannot!"

"Can too!"

Just then, a cop walked by on patrol. A good thing too; he saved me from typing in another twenty lines of dispute over talking walnuts. (Thanks, Joe!) He looked incredulously at the two men. "Hey, aren't you two the guys who broke into Phonetix?"

Pex and Chips turned to stare at him.

"Yeah, you guys. Wanted for breaking into and entering Phonetix."

"Is that why we're here?" Pex asked.

"I should think so."

It took Chips a while to digest that information. He had bad digestion. "But, officer, we didn't break anything!"

"Yeah, we were just standing there playing the shoulder game!"

Joe turned away and walked on. Strange things, these guys. Bodies of gorillas with brains to match. Maybe they really _were_ shaved gorillas. Well, stranger stuff happened. Like the time they detained some illegal immigrants from Ireland claiming they'd seen fairies at Stonehenge. Fairies! Now _that_ was a joke. Them hippies and their acid dreams.

  


Pex sat back and thought through the events of the day.

Chips was startled. "Hey, Pex, you thinking?" It wasn't something his friend did every day.

"Yeah, I think there was something we were supposed to do but we forgot."

"Like what?"

"Did we leave the garage door open?"

That sounded stupid, even to Chips. "Stupid, we don't even have a garage. We live in an apartment, remember?"

"What's remember?"

"Oh, whatever."

"Wait, I think I – oh, that's what remember means! – I think I remember what we were supposed to do!" A long-dead region in Pex's brain began to flush with neural signals traveling with all the speed of snails on a hot afternoon.

"Yeah, Pex, what?"

"We were supposed to go to Frazetti's!"

"Oh, yeah!"

"We were supposed to tell her that her monkey and her metal man were dead or incapati...incatacip..."

"Broken."

"Yeah! Dead or broken."

"And Mr. Spiro owed her thirty-five grand, or something."

"But I don't get it. Mr. Digence didn't look too dead or broken when we were burying him."

"Yeah. I mean, he was crying all along, right? And dead people don't cry, right?"

"Maybe they do, huh? Like in that horror movie!"

"Yeah, the one with all that – that – horror!"

"Well, I still don't think Mr. Digence was dead when we were burying him."

"Maybe he was broken."

"Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he got killed after we buried him."

"Yup, there are strange things in the soil these days. Remember that worm we dug up?"

"Maybe one of those got him. Uhuh."

"Anyway, how are we gonna get to Frazetti's?"

"Maybe we could ask him – Hey, sir, yes you sir!"

It was almost the end of Joe's shift, when he was intercepted again by those two meatheads. He sighed. Why did his patrol route have to pass the cell of idiocy twice? "Yes, inmate?"

"How do we get to Frazetti's?"

"Yeah, we got a message to pass to her really important!"

Suddenly Joe was all ears. A connection between these buffoons and Carla Frazetti, mob daughter, could make a link between their boss, Jon Spiro and Frazetti's godfather, Spatz Antonelli, chief of the Chicago mafia. The day might have been worth something after all...

  



	2. An Unexpected Pairing, Part 1

Author's Note: You've seen Trouble/Holly. You've seen Artemis/Juliet. You've seen Foaly/Root.. ;;v_v (Ok, maybe you haven't.) But are you ready for...

  


**The Aftermath of the C Cube**

  


II: An Unexpected Pairing Pt. 1

  


"Mr. Spiro, Mr. Spiro, wake up!"

  


_He wasn't sure it was a dream: that sight he had of a boy and a – a –_ thing _beside his bed. The boy was pale, even in the context of a totally white bedroom, pale as a vampire with anemia. And the thing looked female, but was shorter than a child, and had a spiffy uniform on and a dangerous-looking thing aimed at his hand. "One cut," the boy said, "Clean."..._

  


He woke up, taking a moment to look carefully at his thumb. Was it supposed to be? - waves of uncertain doubt washed over his mind – it was there alright. No, it was probably a silly nightmare. He wondered, though, why his hand looked much healthier than it ever had. It was probably the sleep, he thought, good, refreshing sleep: he would certainly ask cousin Jon for the opportunity to sleep here again. Although he had no idea why he had been invited to sleep there in the first place.

"Mr. Spiro! Wake – ah, sir, your breakfast is in the normal place."

"Mr. Spiro?"

"Yes, sir, do you want your breakfast or not?"

"Wait – can I have a mirror? Please?"

The servant ran out and fetched the mirror in double quick time. Mr. Spiro, the tough-as-nails mogul of a corporate empire, biggest customer of the Chicago Mafia, saying please? _Please?_ Next thing you knew, he'd merge with Phonetix. The servant shivered in his shoes as he handed the mirror to Mr. Spiro.

Costa looked into the mirror. He looked exactly like...

"Mr. Spiro? Do you want your breakfast?"

"Mr. Spiro? But I'm Costa! Wait, Mr. Spiro gave me a facelift! Here, look here!" He pulled back the top lobe of his ears to show the servant a clear area of skin.

"Mr. Spiro? There's nothing there."

"Wait – what?" He suddenly realized that he was, very convincingly, Mr. Spiro to everyone who saw him. He decided to take advantage of the fact.

"Yes, where's my breakfast?"

"It's right this way sir." The servant decided he would be too disoriented to find the way himself, so he offered, "Follow me, Mr. Spiro."

"Call me Costa – I mean, call me Jon."

"Yes sir." It was probably the thin air, the servant told himself. The thin air at the 85th floor of the Spiro Needle. A few hours of recuperation would probably restore the old Mr. Spiro he was used to. Not that he was excited at the prospect, though. He was beginning to like this guy.

  


Carla was waiting at Jon Spiro's conference room. Not that she had an appointment with him, as the secretary had tried to argue. "No, Mr. Spiro is asleep now, and anyway you don't have an appointment with him. To make an appointment with Mr. Spiro, go down to the ground floor and speak to - "

Interesting, though, how most people comply to your wishes when you put guns to their heads.

Anyway, Carla was waiting for Jon Spiro, clad in his typically immaculate linen suit, exclusively tailored for him by the best designers in Chicago - 

- not a Jon Spiro in a casual T-shirt and jeans. Carla had to admit immediately, he did look a lot better than in that linen suit. It made him look like an anorexic Hindu swami. In this, he looked tall and lean. Actually likeable.

_Likeable?_

"Yes, Carla?" His T-shirt had an arrow pointing at its collar with the caption, "Insert Brain Here." Carla started wondering, half-seriously, how that would be done if necesssary. "Call me Ms. Frazetti, please," she replied coldly. Not that she minded "Carla". It had been a while.

"Yes, Ms. Frazetti?"

"My team."

"What team?"

"The metal man and the monkey. What's happened to them?"

"Eh?"

"Don't play dumb with me, Mr. Spiro. What's happened to the metal man and the monkey team I gave you to get Artemis?"

"Er...I dunno...I think I lost them..."

"It's forty grand for them. Normally I'd charge you thirty-five, but those two were my best guys, you know?" Carla was angry in spite of beginning to feel attracted to him. "More jobs pulled off, both of them, than the rest of my men put together."

"So, when can I pay you?"

"Wire it from your account to mine. Now."

  



	3. A Christmas Present

**The Aftermath of the C Cube**

  


III: A Christmas Present

  


Nuru walked about in his incongruous leather sandals across the unforgiving Kenyan desert. Around him, the Wajiri tribe could be seen engaging in another day's daily work. Around the well, women were busy drawing water while chatting about the recent events at the village. They were almost as strong as the men, though not as muscular; rumour was they had beaten one of their adulterous husbands to death a few days ago. Each woman, taking her turn, would put her large clay water pot, holding at least twenty liters, to the outlet of the pump and keep pushing, all the while maintaining a steady stream of chatter and keeping an eye on her frolicking children if she was married. When the pot was full enough, she would hoist it from the ground onto her head in one fluid motion and trundle her way back to the hut where her family was waiting.

The virgins (and some who were supposedly virgin but really, weren't) loafed around their houses, doing their chores whenever they had any, and also kept an eye out for their siblings playing around under the Kenyan sun. Once their work was done, they would whip out their handphones and start SMS-ing each other. The queer thing was, they were normally within a stone's throw of each other. But there was something about touching those handphones that had more appeal to them than simply getting off their butts, walking across the desert sands and talking to each other face to face.

Funny thing was, nobody knew where anybody got their handphones from. The elders talked about the earth spirits, but nobody else knew who – or what – those were. All they knew was that the latest model – some Nokia something-or-other – had multiplayer Java gaming capability. All the kids were asking for it. When they frolicked around in the sun, they were actually charging their Gameboys. They had solar chargers for their batteries, and their latest game, _Boktai: The Sun Gets In Your Eyes_, required them to be out in the sun, or their weapons in the game would not charge. It was just a solar sensor in the Gameboy cartridge, but the parents liked the revolutionary concept. It got their kids out into the sun, where they stood at least a chance of getting tanned well like their parents.

The men woke early, going to their flocks of desert goats and camels to guide them to the lush pastures at the faraway oasis. The small well at the center of their village could not sustain vegetation, so they went to the the patch of grass some fifty kilometers away. Some of them were farmers instead, tending plots at the oasis; others pulled off trade between theirs and other tribes. And a few of them, the elders, kept relations with the earth spirits.

In all this, Nuru didn't know where he fit in. Their social status rested on their shoes. A strange hierarchy, true, but it was easy for people to hate other people for any reason conceivable. The children went around barefoot, the virgins advertising themselves with bangles and ribbons about their ankles. The young men capitulated by marking their soles with patterns made of a colored stone found nearby that dissolved in water. There were many passing rites from childhood into maturity, but they always involved the giving of a pair of shoes with the benediction, "Go forth and may the ground be your dominion." The ladies got slippers, suspiciously Japanese-looking, while the men got Nikes.

All this left him, Nuru, in the lurch. He had come to the village in a pair of leather sandals. They had been a curiosity for some time, gaining him temporary popularity in the village. Cows could never survive in a water-scarce, grass-deprived landscape like theirs. But the novelty had worn off soon enough, and they thought his sandals looked a lot like a woman's slippers. The village boys had never hesitated to point it out. So Nuru lived the uncertain life of a social outcast, mocked wherever he went. He would not walk barefoot and suffer the worse discrimination of being called a child.

  


Holly had never known her internal spirit of mischief. But she had to admit, she had had fun putting Loafers in those sandals in the first place. She called it "getting rid of anything that might spark his residual memories," but she secretly knew that she had done it for the sole reason of getting him in trouble with the social hierarchy. He had been working very hard since then to get hold of those prized shoes, but he would never have enough, not in a strange economy like theirs, driven by fairy drop-offs of modern conveniences.

Another untidy knot in the stream of humanity, caused by that strange thing called the C Cube.

She missed Artemis. She could not deny it, and she could not change it. But she felt like washing her conscience of at least one other, tiny blot.

  


Nuru woke in the middle of the night. There was not a sound through the house – _wait._

There was a slight shuffling sound. He stirred from under his thin cotton blanket. Someone knocked on his door. "Who is it?"

"I have something for you."

"Come in."

That was the invitation she needed. A small figure walked towards the fireplace, now putting something on the ashes of the blown-out fire. It was a box, small, squat. He coughed, and suddenly the figure turned its head – _her_ head – towards him. 

Holly overlaid her voice with the tones of the _mesmer_, and she stared into his eyes under the soft moonlight. "You don't know who I am," she said. "These shoes you got from the earth spirits who have seen your struggle and granted you dominion over the ground in return. Now you will sleep."

Nuru was snoring before he hit the bed.

Holly lingered for a while, another knot in the aftermath ironed out well. She brushed his brow. "Merry Christmas, Loafers."

  


In the morning, he awoke, wondering about the box on his hearth. He had heard the legends that the earth spirits gave gifts, but he had never had one. He rushed to the box, opening it to see - 

A pair of Nikes.

  


  


A/N: Blessed Christmas everybody at fanfiction.net!


	4. Techies

**The Aftermath of the C Cube**

IV: Techies

"Group one proceed zero point five klicks northwest, spread formation. Engineer fifteen assist land factory three. Engineer sixteen construct Galactic Colossus, touchscreen-entered location."

The noise level surrounding Foaly's cubicle had been increasing day by day, and eventually Holly took it upon herself to march down the corridor to check on the vocal centaur. As she walked closer she could hear, more and more distinctly, a litany of military-sounding commands. What in the name of Frond was he up to? She knocked on the door once, twice. Then she decided that a sneaky entry was better suited to finding out what he was up to anyway. She opened the door a crack and -

"Group three regroup zero point two klicks south - no! no! retreat to base! Group three retreat to - D'Arvit! Engineers twenty to twenty-six patrol at - "

A bewildering sight met Holly's eyes. Instant food packets, wires, copper fragments, little magnets and other bits of random electronica were strewn about Foaly's massive engineering workdesk. Foaly's small lapcomp had been tossed aside to a corner of the cubicle, along with the docking station that normally resided next to his large whiteboard on a small office table. In its place was a small blue box placed next to a larger black box that vibrated and rumbled unhealthily, with a touchscreen at least three feet wide plastered across the whiteboard and secured with a dozen magnets randomly placed around its periphery. Foaly himself was standing in front of the screen, eyes glazed over, incessantly muttering commands, with a large pair of earmuffs - no, headphones over his ears.

Holly threw the door wide open with a bang, hoping to elicit a response from Foaly but getting none. She walked around the talking statue of a centaur to get a better look at the screen. Her confusion grew: was this a giant battle being depicted? This did not appear to be one of those fairy war history videos - or a human one, for that matter; the armies were all gleaming tanks and hulking humanoid robots with guns for arms, otherworldly structures and beam weapons which consistently failed to move at the speed of light, and the battlefield was obviously simulated (though quite realistic). And obviously Foaly himself was in no state to explain. The fine down lining his side, normally combed, was shaggy and disordered; his face was pale and his lips cracked.

Holly was a LEPRecon officer for a reason; she completed this assessment of her surroundings in under half a second and knew that there was only one thing to be done. She yanked the headphones off Foaly's head and screamed, "What in the name of Frond are you doing?"

Foaly blinked once, twice, and turned. "H - Holly?"

"I asked, what in the name of Frond are ... you ... doing?"

"I - isn't it obvious? I'm playing a computer game. Supreme Commander - PAUSE!"

Holly looked closely at the screen and saw that a blue rectangle had come up around one of the larger robots as Foaly yelled this last word. "CDR xXFoalyXx?" she mouthed. "What _is_ this?"

"A computer game. You know? Game? Computer?"

Holly was confused. She knew what a game was: the sprites had their flight races and she was always up for a good game of Guard-Frond chess with Trouble. And she knew what a computer was: her small wrist-mounted touchscreen which displayed tactical information and routed communications from HQ during a mission. She started down instinctively at her arm.

"Ahh, you're looking at your wristpad. That's not a computer. _This_," Foaly stroked the little blue box with a tenderness that deeply discomfited Holly, "now this is a computer."

"Wait. Isn't that a C Cube? The one you were supposed to - "

"- destroy without leaving a trace." Foaly mocked Root's high-pitched purple-faced voice. "Yes, yes, what would a bunch of elves know about technology? Do you have any idea how hard it is for centaurs to have fun?"

"You tell me."

"The computer games of the Lower Elements are ridiculous! The last human game that the programmers bothered to port was Command and Conquer Two, and their own games are even sillier! For one, since the programmers are bleeding-heart elves, you can't kill anybody. And another, since the programmers are wonderfully emotive and imaginative elves, the graphics - if there are any - are extremely primitive. And finally, since the programmers are all wonderful elvish believers in the power of self-confidence, the hostile AIs - if there are any - are ridiculously easy to beat!"

"Yes, yes, but maybe electronics were designed for work, not - "

"EXACTLY!" Foaly roared. "The best electronics in the Lower Elements come from the LEP's own foundries - which I'm not allowed to control, out of regulatory safety, whatever that is - and what do you have? Oh, wireless communication chips. Tactical assessment chips. Biosensor monitoring chips. Neutrino power control chips - "

"On-the-shoulder chips," Holly muttered.

" - The last time anybody made a piece of integrated circuitry dedicated to any kind of graphical computations was in the fifteenth century! Then silly juvenile elves used them to project red tears onto human statues, and that was that."

Holly was tiring of this. "And so, when you stumbled upon a piece of technology that defeated your surveillance systems in half a second, you decided that the best use of it was to entertain yourself for weeks on end without leaving your cubicle."

"Yes. Yes! Voice recognition and multi-tactile touch-screen compatible input, two-point-five-eight terahertz equivalent clock speed across twenty-eight processor threads, graphics processing power off the charts with an entire gigabyte of dedicated video memory! I've already completed Crysis: Warhead on this baby with rendering rate never below sixty fps; those aboveground idiots think they're lucky if they hit thir - "

The LEPRecon standard operating procedures had exactly one recommendation for dealing with incomprehensible hostiles. Holly unholstered her Neutrino and, before Foaly could react, thumbed it to the highest setting and fired off three shots at the little blue cube.

When the smoke had cleared the cube had barely a scratch on it.

"Radiation resistant too, did I mention? Carbon fiber inlaid with beta-phase graphene all the ... "

And suddenly the black box beside it belched sparks in every direction before exploding in a loud bang.

Foaly turned to see Root standing in the doorway, blowing across the muzzle of his Neutrino for theatrical effect before holstering it. "Not much good for long without a power supply, is it?" he said, his eyes locked on Foaly's as they began to fill with tears.

"Sometimes it's not the techies who know what's the most important part of technology," he began to soliloquize, turning his back on the cubicle and starting to walk away. Then he paused.

"And Holly? It isn't just 'shoot first, ask questions later'. It's 'shoot _everything_ first'."


End file.
